The Love-Hate of Luis Bunuel

"Thank God, I am still an atheist," claims Director Luis Bunuel. On that rock he has built his crutch--a lifelong obsession with Spanish Catholicism. In a career that spans four decades and nearly 40 films, Bunnel, now 69, has occasionally abandoned the object of his love-hate, as in the erotic trivia of Belle de Jour. But such lapses are brief. With The Milky Way the grand old unbeliever returns to his favorite theme in a magical mystery tour of the dogma, hypocrisy and glories of Christianity.

From the llth century through the Middle Ages, European pilgrims worked their weary way to the tomb of the supposed apostle James in the northwestern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela. In Spain, the path of St. James is a synonym for the Milky Way. Now, in the 20th century, two weary mendicants dodge cars and trucks as they retrace the ancient route.

Asylum Attendants. These days the shrine should be easily accessible. Actually, it is harder to reach than heaven. The bearded old wanderer Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and his young companion lean (Laurent Terzieff) are magnets for metaphysical flashbacks. A caped gentleman from another century lectures them on piety, gives them money, then disappears down the road--with a dwarf that suddenly appears at his side. A chauffeur gives them a lift, but when one of the pilgrims mutters "Ah, God," the men are unceremoniously booted out of the car. Seeking shelter from a storm, the beggars are transported to the 14th century, where a heretical sect seeks salvation through orgy. At an inn, a priest (Francois Maistre) defines the dogma of transubstantiation--and then is carried off by a pair of asylum attendants.

Many of the episodes--and actors --are charged with a peculiar magic that dilates space and annihilates time. Centuries collide; the imagined becomes surreal, as when Jean daydreams of the Pope's assassination--and the shot is clearly heard by a passerby. Or when a nun's self-sacrifice becomes actual crucifixion. But where he should use a No. 3 paintbrush, Bunuel too often employs a palette knife. What is intended as subtle Human Comedy becomes broadly laughable, as when Jesus and his disciples run through the woods in chromo-colored sequences, or when Mary miraculously appears after a hunter has shot a rosary from a tree branch, or when an unintentionally effeminate devil (Pierre Clementi) pops up in the back of a wrecked automobile.

Cluttered with Bunuel's standard paraphernalia of stigmata, deformity, mud and fire, The Milky Way offers no unified vision, no system of thought or style. The lack of cohesion is deliberate, claims Bunuel: "Mystery is the essential element of every work of art. If a work of art is clear, then my interest in it ends."

Such an apologia may be offered by the confused and untalented artist as well as by the gifted one. The Milky Way, in fact, seems made of both varieties. Its shards and fragments remain in the retina long after the film has flashed by. Yet the angry whole is never equal to some of its parts--as if, like a doctor attending a plagued patient, Bunuel had been infected by what he was treating. "We have just enough religion to make us hate," said Swift, "but not enough to make us love one another." It is impossible to differentiate between the faults of the church and the faults of Bunuel.

After the completion of Belle de Jour in 1966, Luis Bunuel Delphically announced: "No more cinema for me--not in Spain, not in France, nowhere. Belle de Jour is my last film, semicolon."

Then, with scarcely a pause, he began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Bunuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, he started the opening battle in his long war against church and state. At the University of Madrid, he was an intimate of the revolutionary poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the genius-impostor Salvador Dali, with whom he shared two main interests, cinema and surrealism. Later, they made two pioneer films: The Andalusian Dog, notable for its explicit Freudian imagery and resolute non-meaning, and The Age of Gold, which contained frenzied images of a homicidal Christ figure. That succes de scandale severed the collaborators forever. "The film was a caricature of my ideas," complained Dali. "Catholicism was attacked in an obvious way, and quite without poetry."

In voluntary exile from Salvador Dali and Franco Spain, Bunuel resumed his career in Mexico, where he made his landmark in the Cinema of Cruelty, Los Olvidados, a fierce, searing lament for the Mexican poor. The cinema, he claimed, was "most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep"--and he kept on dreaming onscreen. Soon foreign film makers--and avant-garde American ones--began to imitate his trancelike style.

In 1960, word of Bunuel's enlarging reputation reached Generalissimo Franco, who invited Bunuel back to the old country to make a film, all expenses paid. Biting the handout that fed him, Bunuel created Viridiana, a movie with the inexorable rhythm of a time bomb. Vatican and Franco partisans needed only one look at the scene in which a nun is raped by a beggar; Viridiana was swiftly disowned.

Pained Penguin. But Spain, Franco and Bunuel now seem equally aged, if not exactly mellowed. The director and his French wife maintain homes in Mexico and Madrid. Both of his sons dabble in the arts, Raphael as a sculptor, Juan Luis as an experimental-film maker. This fall, the old man returned to his motherland once more, where, again, he is working on his "last" film. Under the sullen skies of Toledo, he directs scenes from Tristana, a dissection of Spanish middle-class society. One scene is purest Bunueliana: a crumpled, baggy-eyed Catherine Deneuve sits in a wheelchair, munching empty ice cream cones. Pushing the wheelchair is a deaf-mute with a demented stare, while from a park bench a large woman breast-feeding her child stares vacantly at the tragic caravan.

Grunting in a heavy Aragonese accent, Director Bunuel articulates his mouth little and his bones even less. As a result, actors and production staff are often forced to sift for themselves every mysterious movement. "He's old; he has his own way of working and his own discipline, and you have to fit into that discipline," says Deneuve. "You wake up in the morning knowing you're going to have to accept what he tells you to do without question; not with resignation but with confidence." Her confidence may have been bolstered by another of Bunuel's symbolic acts; early this month, for the first time in 20 years, he departed from his custom of dining alone while a film is being shot. He had dinner with her.

On set and off, weary and almost completely deaf, Bunuel moves like a pained penguin, as if he feels every second of his 69 years. Yet like his countryman Picasso, his large, intense eyes seem illuminated from inside by some unquenchable zeal. No one knows whether Tristana will indeed be his finale or whether Luis Bunuel is trying to propitiate fate by loudly leaving art before reality quietly leaves him. If there is any certainty about the enigmatic old film maker, it was recently voiced by New Wave Director Louis Malle: "Bunuel will die with the director's light meter dangling round his neck."

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